The concerns of a champion are new to Loyola basketball, which had floundered for the better part of two decades before Patsos took over in 2004. After seven up-and-down seasons, Patsos led Loyola to its first NCAA tournament appearance since 1994 in the spring. And with their three leading scorers returning, the Greyhounds are widely considered a favorite to win the MAAC again.

The turnaround might have taken longer than Patsos expected when he left Maryland to take over the moribund program. But his players, many of them from the Baltimore-Washington corridor, are out to prove last season was no anomaly.

"There might be some people out there who believe last year was a fluke," says Erik Etherly, the team's leading scorer and rebounder. "Right now, we're just like, 'All right, let's win it again, because if we win it twice in a row, no one can call it a fluke.'"

The men flanking Patsos at the benefit for the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation have been there. Williams led Maryland from the depths of the ACC to a national championship. Jay Wright took Villanova to seven straight NCAA tournaments after the program had been shut out of March Madness for five years.

"I think it's probably one of the most difficult things to do in sports is, to repeat whenever you're trying to repeat any level of success," Wright says. "Because it's human nature to be average. You want to be content. If you're a salesman and you meet your quota, you want to take a couple days off. … What Jimmy's got to do this year is probably more challenging than getting there. Getting there is fun."

Williams agrees, remembering the season-opening loss his 2001-02 team suffered against Arizona, following a Final Four run the previous spring.

"It was really hard to calm down by the start of next season," he says. "They beat us pretty easily, and so that might have been the best thing that happened to us that year. It was really a wake-up call that just because we won last year and we had those guys back, there was no guarantee. We got down to work after that, and we became a much better team."

In fact, the Terps lost only three more games and won the national title.

Though Patsos doesn't want to lose when Loyola opens its season hosting Binghamton on Friday night, he's thinking along the same lines as Williams, trying to jolt his team at every opportunity as preseason practices come to a close.

"He's gotten into us a little bit and tried to wake us up," says senior Robert Olson, the team's best outside shooter. "He can tell we're maybe not quite ready for what's coming, because we've never been in this place before. We've never been the hunted. We're used to hunting. We need to have that chip on our shoulder, and Jimmy's trying to get us ready for that."

Players say the voluble Patsos has responded to success by changing hardly at all. The chip on his shoulder is just as solid, the fire in his belly just as hot.

"Same guy man, same guy," says junior guard Dylon Cormier, Loyola's second-leading scorer. "I love him. That's one of my best friends. I can talk to him about anything."

Patsos admits he's nervous about how his team will respond. The line he's dancing is tricky. He wants his players to let go of last season's results but not the feeling they experienced of coming together behind a common purpose.

"Yes I have," he says when asked if he has urged his players to forget. "But I also don't want to sour the mood, because it's pretty good. … I'm a happy guy, so I want to keep things going that way."

Asked when they knew last season would be special, Etherly, Olson and Cormier all give different answers.

Etherly points to a team retreat a few weeks before the start of practice, where the players traded personal stories and talked about what they hoped to do as a group. "Right then and there, we all saw that we had the talent, but that brought us together as a team," he says. "We became one mind focused on what we had to do."

For Olson, the feeling came during an eight-game winning streak that followed an opening loss to Wake Forest. "We all liked each other," he says. "We were real cohesive on the court."

Cormier remembers the team's spirited first-half effort in a loss at eventual national champion Kentucky. The day before, Patsos had scrawled a "play hard" contract on a dry-erase board in Loyola's locker room. "We signed it and he said that if we buy into it, we have a chance to be MAAC champs," Cormier remembers. "And two months later, sure enough, we were MAAC champs."

Though the moments of realization were different, each player came to the same feeling: after years of building, Loyola not only had the talent to win, it had the internal trust.

The spoils — a rocking home arena, recognition around their North Baltimore campus, the joy of watching "Loyola" pop onto the screen during the NCAA tournament selection show — were lovely

Prospects for a repeat look good on paper, but the players know there's no guarantee the same spirit will reappear when they take the court this week.

Despite the returning stars, Loyola is not the same team as in 2011-12. Gone are center Shane Walker, the team's second-leading rebounder and a deft passer and shooting threat from the top of the key, and guard Justin Drummond, last year's instant offense off the bench. Six freshmen fill out Patsos' roster.

Opponents, of course, won't care about that. Once Loyola enters MAAC play, every team will want to knock off the champs. Every game, Patsos tells his players, will be like a little Super Bowl.

"Jimmy's one of those kind of people where you have to earn it every single year from him," Etherly says. "We've all put the rings away and it's time to focus on what we can be in 2012-13, not what we were in 2011-12."

Jimmy Patsos, who coached the Loyola University men's basketball team to a 24-9 record this past season and the school's first NCAA Tournament berth in 18 years, has been rewarded with a multi-year contract extension, a university source confirmed Wednesday.

Local basketball fans will have 81 Division I men's players from this area to track this season. The Sun's annual list highlights natives of Anne Arundel County, Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Carroll County, Harford County and Howard County, and/or graduates of high schools in those areas....